The present disclosure relates generally to searching information of computing devices. More particularly, the present disclosure relates to dynamically expanding the amount of information displayed with search or query results of computing devices.
Corporate networks, intranets, the Internet, and the World Wide Web (“Web”) contain vast amounts of information. People spend countless hours searching for documents, either for work, educational research, learning, or for leisurely reading. For example, with the assistance of Internet search engines, computer users can connect to computer systems located around the globe and read information on web pages, look up phone numbers, search through and read digitized books and magazines from libraries, read online news reports, search and read through blogs, and shop for almost anything. Locating contextually relevant information in this sea of information, however, is often challenging.
To locate documents on the Internet, users frequently use an Internet search engine. Internet users typically enter one or more key search or query terms, which may include Boolean operators, into a user interface of a search engine and transmit the search request to a network of servers running the search engine. Search engines generally index information of web pages and other documents of the Web and associate the information with a uniform resource locator (URL) for each page. For example, many search engines index the full body of visible text for a document, but exclude commonly used words, e.g., “the”, “and”, etc. Search engines may also index keywords included in a special keyword meta tag in the document that holds keywords the page designer designates to use for searching purposes.
When a user performs a search on the Web, the search engine receives the query terms and usually searches indexed information for content items that are associated with the query terms. Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks, such as hyperlinks to the URLs, for web pages that seem to match the content for which the user is searching. Generally, search engines base their search results based on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The search engines try to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages or portable document format (PDF) documents) to the user based on the keywords and Boolean operators of the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages, indexed in the manner described previously. Web pages that contain the search terms of the user are identified as search matches or search hits.
Although using Internet search engines to locate information over the Internet is effective, it is often slow and tedious. For example, in response to a search query a search engine may locate hundreds, thousands, or even millions of search results, many of which are often not relevant. As a result, search engine users may be overwhelmed by the enormous amount of search results.
To help reduce the amount of information that a user has to view when examining search results, search, engines often return a fixed amount of data per search execution. For example, each search result match may include numerous pieces of summary information, such as title of the web document of the result match, portions of information from the web document, and a hyperlink for the URL to retrieve or view the document. When passing a mouse pointer or cursor over the title, the user may see the source URL for the web document. The portions of information from the web document may include small segments of text that include one or more of the search terms of the search query, often highlighted or in bold lettering for emphasis.
Unfortunately, the portions of information from the web document often include no more than a few sentence segments. Reviewing the search results with such limited information often forces the user to click on a link to see if the result match is relevant to the information that the user seeks. This often causes an inconvenience to the user, as most browser applications abruptly change the information on the display screen when the user clicks a link-embedded portion for a search result. This abrupt change of information on the display often makes it difficult for the user to keep track of the initial search pages, linked pages viewed from the initial search page, and precisely where the user is relevant to viewing a series of several pages.
Some search engines allow a user to customize the number of lines returned. However the number of lines selectable by the user is static for all search results. For example, the user may increase the number of lines of summary information from three lines to ten lines. However, this generally increases bandwidth but still frequently does not provide sufficient information to allow the user to determine whether the results are relevant. Additionally, this known solution does not allow the user to expand just a single page or result match in which the user is interested. Again, the user is forced to visit and retrieve the web page to determine the actual relevancy of the content.